After defeating fascists and communists, can the West now defeat the Islamists?

On the face of it, its military preponderance makes victory seem inevitable. Even if Tehran acquires a nuclear weapon, Islamists have nothing like the military machine the Axis deployed in World War II, nor the Soviet Union during the cold war.

What do the Islamists have to compare with the Wehrmacht or the Red Army? The SS or Spetznaz? The Gestapo or the KGB? Or, for that matter, to Auschwitz or the gulag?

**Yet, more than a few analysts, including myself, worry that it's not so simple. Islamists (defined as persons who demand to live by the sacred law of Islam, the Sharia) might in fact do better than the earlier totalitarians.

The primary lesson I take away from 2006 is that we often do not believe what we see in front of us, to our own detriment and danger.The most obvious example is the Islamist triumph in Somalia, begun in the middle of the year, yet receiving virtually no serious policy attention until very recently. It is hard to fathom why a self-proclaimed Islamist-Salafist movement, clear it is aims, could be viewed as a secondary concern. While the bedrock support for the movements is clan-based and the Islamic Courts enjoy some popular support for restoring law and order, there appears to have been little creative thinking as to how to counter-balance the more radical elements.Now we face a series of bad options. Ethiopia may drive the Islamist groups out of Mogadishu, but Somalia is already viewed by much of the Islamist community as another attempt to establish the beginnings of the Caliphate. Foreign fighters, along with the Somalis, will likely prolong the fight through guerrilla warfare long into the future. It sets up a clear (in the jihadi mind, at least) conflict between Christian/Jewish Crusaders and Islam, a huge drawing card for the Islamist movement.

This means the whole Horn of Africa is now in danger of a spreading war that can, in the end, only help those who profit from chaos and unaccountability.